Used in a number of orthographies around the world instead of or in combination with quotation marks, the term is a diminutive of Guillaume (William) after the pioneering sixteenth century French printer and font-founder Guillaume Le Bรฉ—France being the primary place where they are employed, though the nested quotes are used elsewhere and in other ways, including in Japan and China where « » sets off the title of a book or album, in Portuguese and Swiss German (called Mรถwchen, little Sea Gulls) to indicated a reported quotation within a quotation, and inwardly pointing » « to bracket off direct speech. In Quebec, a singular right pointing guillemet itรฉratif is used as a ditto mark.
Saturday 6 February 2021
Friday 5 February 2021
don’t @ me
While the earliest known attested use is to be found in a fourteenth century translation of a Greek chronicle with the at symbol substituted for the ฮฑ of amen for unknown reasons and in commerce as a glyph representing the unit of volume and mass the arroba on the Iberian Peninsula—about two stone or twelve kilograms before signifying a going rate, despite its inclusion on most Western keyboards, it remained something of a mystery until the widespread use of the internet and social media. Traditions outside of English general ledger accounting (and in reality everyone prior to email) perceived the rather useless upper carriage key as something twee mentioned in a typo—as in Afrikaans, Dutch, Finnish, German, Macedonian and Polish where it’s a tail of a pig, puppy, cat or monkey. Astutely in Norwegian, Welsh, Korean, Esperanto, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Belarusian it is the word for snail, whereas in Catalan, Hebrew, Swedish and Slovak it is the word for a pastry roll. Though informal stylings probably prevail, in the Kazakh language, @ is officially called ะฐะนาาฑะปะฐา—that is, the Moon’s Ear.
Monday 1 February 2021
๐️๐จ️
Via Waxy, we are referred to an expansive and growing and searchable collection of graphic design related items, materials and resources organised from and available at the Internet Archives (previously) by curator Valery Marier. Categories include font specimens, annuals, style guides, book jackets, infographics, data visualisations, various advertising ephemera and vintage branding devices.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฃ, libraries and museums
Friday 29 January 2021
8x8
testi stampati: the riotous typographical illustratrations of Lorenzo Petrantoni
painterly realism: Nathan Shipley trained a neural network to turn portraiture into convincingly true-to-life photographs
civilian climate corps: a vision of how putting people to work on conservation projects can help save both the environment and the economynarratology: a purportedly exhaustive list of dramatic situations—see also here and here
stonx: a long thread explaining the GameStop short-squeeze—via Miss Cellania
paradoxical undressing: National Geographic forwards a new theory to account for the Dyatlov Pass Incident (previously) of 1959
butler in a box: before digital assistants there was domestic aid in the late 1980s
will success spoil rock hunter: Art of the Title looks at the opening montage of the 1957 CinemaScope classic
Saturday 16 January 2021
ัััััะธ
First articulated out the Cyrillic script (see previously) in the Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century following a long established Greek, Ionian convention to differentiate numerals from letters when context was not exactly clear with spacers, dots and a diacritic over the glyphs called a titlo ҃ or as a prefix signalling a long string of numbers to follow ҂, like a tilde or macron. Still sometimes seen in Slavonic Church publications and in old monuments and coinage, the system was in use until the civil reforms (see also) of Peter the Great in the early seventeen hundreds when Hindu-Arabic representations were introduced and because of this centuries-long custom continued well into the early modern era, elaborate signs were developed to express powers of magnitude and in terms of both a long and short scale (lesser and greater count multiplier) for accounting and scientific purposes. Align with the Greek (rather than alphabetically), one through ten, correspond with the Cyrillic letters: ะ, ะ, ะ, ะ, ะ, ะ , ะ, ะ, ัฒ and ะ. The pictured powers of ten using the older alpha form, with the Myriad (ะขัะผะฐ) encircled ⃝ either ten-thousand or a million and Many Myriad ꙲ either one billion or 10⁵⁰.
Saturday 9 January 2021
monogrammed
The comprehensive rebranding—new uniforms, colour scheme, packaging, signage plus digital assets and merchandising (see also here and here) returning to the fast food franchise’s corporate branding circulated and experimented with from 1969 through 1999. Especially brilliant is the letterform, a double-struck B and K in a bun for Burger King by Jones Knowles Ritchey. The mascot and monarch are not featured in this new roll-out but we are assured that he has not abdicated or been otherwise dethroned.
Friday 8 January 2021
7x7
forty winks: this Pokรฉmon Gengar sleeping companion
flair: the outsized legacy of a 1950 graphic design magazineper my previous tweet: Trump silent on continued damage and defacement of federal monuments
nangajo: ushering in the Year of the Metal Ox with this blended Japanese New Year’s tradition—previously
๐: anti-social media removes ‘like’ feature (see also) from public-facing sites—via Slashdot
r/obscuremedia: enjoy this soothing VHS tape from 1984 “Escape to Nature’s Beauty”
witchfinder general: King James’ other book—Demonology
Sunday 3 January 2021
schrifterlaร
On this day in 1941 in a directive circulated by head of the party chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann settled the long-standing Fraktur-Antiqua Dispute (see previously) by declaring the former “undesirable” and the latter Latin script influenced by printing and automation to be in align with the ideals of Nazism. Although a typographical debate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the blackletter and calligraphic typefaces coexisted. Originally seen as un-German when the Antiqua font came in after the 1806 dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and scholastically used for parsing Germanic tradition and terminology from foreign influences, supporters and proponents on both sides extolled the virtues of their preferred over the alternative, citing one was better for compact printing, higher legibility—did not contribute to myopia and blindness, more universal, less ornamental, and so on. Eventually these arguments began to carry ideological and political weight, with the Fรผhrer denouncing its continued use in 1934 in a speech before the Reichtag: “Your alleged Gothic internalisation does not find a place in this age of iron and steel, glass and concrete—of womanly beauty and manly strength—of headraised high with defiance…” The probable motivation for this edict was for ease in distributing propaganda material to countries being occupied and attacked in a typeface that the besieged were familiar with.
Thursday 31 December 2020
sลsaku kanji kontesuto
Language Log shares some of the top entrants for this eleventh annual Kanji Creation Contest submitted from the general public and school age participants during this past year. Many of these modified character forms—absolutely brilliant in their subtle transformation to imbue them with more meaning—are of course informed by the year’s course of events, like the overall winner, a reworking of the standard glyph ๅบง (za—to sit).
With social distancing in mind, the ไบบ elements are spaced further apart. Similarly, for ไผ (kai—to meet), the bottom supporter has been replaced with a Z for Zoom. See more at the link up top, including some non-pandemic-related words that could be classified as sniglets—words (see also here and here) and symbols to convey concepts that ought to already exist yet don’t, leaving a lexical gap for the filling.Sunday 27 December 2020
‽
Via ibidem, we are directed towards a modest proposal from Fast Company contributing correspondent Dylan Mulvaney suggesting that a mostly forgotten punctuation mark, the interrobang (see previously here and here), that had its moment in the mid-60s to early 70s might be enlisted as we go boldly, flummoxed into 2021 and might be due for a revival. What do you think? A well-placed Madison Avenue adman called Martin Speckter who represented some of the biggest corporations at the time also happened to be the editor of a trade paper called TYPEtalks and proposed in a March 1962 magazine article entitled “Making a New Point—Or How About That…” his pitch for a new punctuation mark, arguably the first in centuries, his versatile, emotive interrobang. What do you think? There’s quite a bit to be said for consistency for adoption and though added to typewriters back then and included in Unicode today so it’s at one’s disposal, but there’s also a bit of a touch of trying too hard to it.
♃
Monday 21 December 2020
vรจvรจ
Either derived from a common cosmogram or schema representing the constellations or from the Nsibidi syllabary used by some peoples of West and Central Africa taken to the Americas by enslaved diaspora (or a bit of both), the religious symbols used in voodoo ceremonies and rituals is comparable to our extensive vernacular of signs and sigils employed in demonology and serve a similar purpose—which makes the later magicking seem like fanboy appropriation. Described as a beacon, vรจvรจs represent astral forces and compel the loa, lwa—that is the intermediary or medium—to do the bidding of the summoner, provided adequate sacrifice is offered. As with creating a mandala, the symbol is drawn on the flood with a mixture of sand and ash.
Monday 7 December 2020
8x8
ัะฐัะฐ́ัะพะฒ-2:some urban spelunking leads to a Soviet computer graveyard (previously) with some early machines thought lost to the ages
indented writing: this case of an invisible will recalls some more recent forensic intervention to retrieve the words of a blind novelist
parallel dimensions: one-hundred twenty-five artists render different computer-generated environments on one basic template of a character walking towards a mountain
starfleet bold extended: the typography created for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (see previously, premiering on this day in 1979)
♚: the real-life Queen’s Gambit in Georgian chess champion Nona Gaprindashvili
the panoply of digital phrenology: the coming subprime attention crisis and the bursting of the ad-serving bubble
petroglyphs: more on the amazing expanse of pre-Columbian art discovered in the Amazon
ฮบฮฟฯ ฮผฯฯฮผฮญฮฝฮฟ ฮผฮต ฮบฮฟฯ ฮผฯฮนฮฌ: exploring an abandoned factory in Patisia Greece
Sunday 22 November 2020
alfabeti shqip
Wednesday 18 November 2020
twinkle, twinkle
We are treated to an albeit abridged but nonetheless thoroughgoing history of the asterisk from Keith Houston’s Shady Characters, beginning with a frustrated librarian of Alexandria called Zenodotus who was determined to make a version of the epics of Homer as close to their original form as possible before centuries of editing, commentary and poetic license had turned the text into the unruly document that Zenodotus and colleagues were now heir to. In order to pare down the Iliad and the Odyssey, Zenodotus devised tracked-changes and version control, first introducing a range of proofreading or editor’s marks, to begin with a dash (—) in the margins to indicate a line to be excised, later named the obelos—that is, a roasting-spit.
Wednesday 28 October 2020
putt putt to the pizza hut
Saturday 24 October 2020
the past is another country
8x8
bongo cat: a joyous, simple noisemaker—via Boing Boing
der orchideengarten: Austrian fantasy-horror revue that prefigured and informed Weird Tales and related properties
backscatter: spooky, simple photography techniques and visual effects to haunt one’s Halloween picture portfolioporto-potty: Austrian postal service issues a special, rather expensive toilet-paper stamp whose proceeds go to charities benefiting those impacted most by COVID-19
llama glama: a llama-based webfont—via Pasa Bon!
smitten kitchen: for this US Food Day (made-up as a counterpart to Earth Day but never really took off) a look into the recipe library of Georgia O’Keeffe plus others
clean up on aisle four: glass-floor of a supermarket in Dublin reveals a millennium old glimpse of Hiberno-Norse history (see also here and here)
flags and drums: young brothers in Pakistan play BBC News theme on the table
Monday 19 October 2020
font specimen
Boing Boing brings us a nice retrospective appreciation of the life and work of the recently departed typographer Ephram Edward (Ed) Benguiat (*1927), whose expansive family of fonts every one of us has surely encountered and used—Bookman, ITC Avant Garde, Panache, Souvenir—plus his formatting, layout and logotype for periodicals including Esquire, Playboy, Reader’s Digest, the San Diego Tribune newspaper and Sport Illustrated.
Beginning his work in graphic design just after World War II as a so called “cleavage retoucher,” Benguiat was part of a team assigned to airbrush out nudity or otherwise suggestive images in film and magazines to comply with Hays Code impositions, however by the 1970s his signature aesthetic for display typefaces and titles was in the kerning—regarded as “sexy spacing” between letters, flirtatiously not quite touching. Aside from movie posters and corporate campaigns for Super Fly (1972), Planet of the Apes (1968) and Foxy Brown (1974, ITC Caslon, № 224), Benguiat also was responsible for the opening credits sequence for the prestige television series Stranger Things. Learn more at the links above.